The timing and widespread effects of the largest Holocene volcanic eruption in Antarctica

• Main Authors: Antoniades, D., Giralt, Santiago, Geyer, Adelina, Álvarez-Valero, A. M., Pla-Rabes, S., Granados, I., Liu, E. J., Toro, M., Smellie, J. L., Oliva, Marc
• Other Authors: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (España), Generalitat de Catalunya
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2018
• Subjects: caldera collapse; Deception Island Volcano; volcanology; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; Deception Island; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/173354; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002809; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000038; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100004837

The caldera collapse of Deception Island Volcano, Antarctica, was comparable in scale to some of the largest eruptions on Earth over the last several millennia. Despite its magnitude and potential for far-reaching environmental effects, the age of this event has never been established, with estimates ranging from the late Pleistocene to 3370 years before present. Here we analyse nearby lake sediments in which we identify a singular event produced by Deception Island’s caldera collapse that occurred 3980 ± 125 calibrated years before present. The erupted tephra record the distinct geochemical composition of ejecta from the caldera-forming eruption, whilst an extreme seismic episode is recorded by lake sediments immediately overlying the collapse tephra. The newly constrained caldera collapse is now the largest volcanic eruption confirmed in Antarctica during the Holocene. An examination of palaeorecords reveals evidence in marine and lacustrine sediments for contemporaneous seismicity around the Antarctic Peninsula; synchronous glaciochemical volcanic signatures also record the eruption in ice cores spread around Antarctica, reaching >4600 km from source. The widespread footprint suggests that this eruption would have had significant climatic and ecological effects across a vast area of the south polar region. © 2018, The Author(s). Field work for this study was supported by the Spanish (2007; MEC grant POL2006-06635/CGL) and Portuguese (2012; grant PTDC/CTE-GIX/119582/2010) Polar programs. D.A. thanks the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s Discovery Grants program and the Instituto Antártico Uruguayo for logistical support. A.M.A-V. acknowledges funding from the Programa Propio I (Usal-2014), and the assistance of the Ramón y Cajal research program (RYC-2011-07584). A.G. thanks the MICINN grants CTM2009-05919-E, CGL2010-22022-C02-02, CGL2015-72629-EXP, CTM2016-79617-P (AEI/FEDER-UE) and the support provided by the Ramón y Cajal research program (RYC-2012-11024). MICINN grant ...